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It also creates disincentives for letting land lay unused. Why would we have forests or parks or homesteads when we have to pay taxes based on what someone else

It also creates disincentives for letting land lay unused. Why would we have forests or parks or homesteads when we have to pay taxes based on what someone else thinks the potential value generation of the land is? And how to we make sure that such a tax doesn't just push us further down the path of using as many natural resources as we can? A land tax is based on the assumption that all land should be used to its maximal financial value. I don't know about you, but I fundamentally disagree with that and don't want to live in a world where we've codified the need to use up whatever we have.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
The western US states all have urban growth boundaries for this reason. > just push us further down the path of using as many natural resources as we can? Using more surface area is using as many natural resources as we can. Energy = mass * distance. The further people live away, from each other, the more energy is consumed, for doing everything. A land value tax would incentivize density, and density reduces the use of as natural resources. The people living in 10x10x10 homes in Honk Kong are using magnitudes less natural resources than hundreds of millions of people in US suburbia and exurbia.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > Energy = mass * distance. The further people live away, from each other, the more energy is consumed, for doing everything That only holds if things stay just as centralized as they are today. If people live further from each other they have more potential for producing their own goods. That also means everyone around then has that potential as well. For example, living in a dense area means any lumber you buy was shipped in, and likely even crossed national borders. Living in a less populated area can mean access to lumber from a local lumber yard that processes trees grown locally. I think the real challenge we have today is that we are stuck in the middle, our society is neither designed for dense populations or low density populations. There's nothing that I've seen that can definitively show that dense populations will always work better than less dense, more independent populations. Either can work well and either can be much better utilized than what we have today. What I really take issue with is a central authority forcing one approach on us. Because we can't show why one path has to be the best, and because we don't know what we don't know, the decision should never be made at all by those in charge. The beauty of a federal model is to allow smaller regions to go their own way and try different approaches. I wouldn't balk at all if Los Angeles wanted to try a land value tax, let's see what happens. I personally don't think it will work well and I think there isn't a good answer for how to appropriately value the land, but I also don't live there and as long as my federal tax dollars aren't given to LA I have no dog in that fight.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    > If people live further from each other they have more potential for producing their own goods. I think this is extremely unlikely because it is so much cheaper to mass manufacture and ship things across literally half the entire world than to make them locally. Energy/resource usage is not dominated by low frequency lumber trips, it is the every day push and pull of the mass of people, water, sewage, garbage, food, etc. Without reverting to 1400s lifestyle where you only consume stuff made within a few hundred miles of you, I don’t think there is any way a modern populace consumed less by using more space.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      So you would push for centralization and higher density not because its the only good solution, but because you think people wouldn't want the alternative, right? I don't see anything wrong with your guess that people wouldn't want it, but should that option be effectively removed from us through programs like a tax that incentivizes high density? There's a sawmill I get lumber from about 10 minutes from my house. He gets all his logs from arborists within a few hours of here. They all give him the logs for free because the alternative is either burning them or having to pay by the truckload to take them to the dump. I don't live in the 1400s but I do very much appreciate the ability to get lumber that was milled locally and would otherwise have just been dropped in a hole with a bunch of garbage.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        I don’t see why your lumber mill has to be affected? Land value tax proposals would mostly just change things in urban areas, where land is scarce and valuable. There are no lumber mills there, just rich people who own the land from either having inherited it or an REIT owning it, waiting for it to appreciate. I’m assuming you live in a rural area, which have (relatively) low land values. It’s the strip mall suburbs that are highly inefficiently developed due to no penalty on the inefficiency (caused by low density).
        _heimdall 2y ago

lotsofpulp 2y ago

The western US states all have urban growth boundaries for this reason. > just push us further down the path of using as many natural resources as we can? Using more surface area is using as many natural resources as we can. Energy = mass * distance. The further people live away, from each other, the more energy is consumed, for doing everything. A land value tax would incentivize density, and density reduces the use of as natural resources. The people living in 10x10x10 homes in Honk Kong are using magnitudes less natural resources than hundreds of millions of people in US suburbia and exurbia.

_heimdall 2y ago
> Energy = mass * distance. The further people live away, from each other, the more energy is consumed, for doing everything That only holds if things stay just as centralized as they are today. If people live further from each other they have more potential for producing their own goods. That also means everyone around then has that potential as well. For example, living in a dense area means any lumber you buy was shipped in, and likely even crossed national borders. Living in a less populated area can mean access to lumber from a local lumber yard that processes trees grown locally. I think the real challenge we have today is that we are stuck in the middle, our society is neither designed for dense populations or low density populations. There's nothing that I've seen that can definitively show that dense populations will always work better than less dense, more independent populations. Either can work well and either can be much better utilized than what we have today. What I really take issue with is a central authority forcing one approach on us. Because we can't show why one path has to be the best, and because we don't know what we don't know, the decision should never be made at all by those in charge. The beauty of a federal model is to allow smaller regions to go their own way and try different approaches. I wouldn't balk at all if Los Angeles wanted to try a land value tax, let's see what happens. I personally don't think it will work well and I think there isn't a good answer for how to appropriately value the land, but I also don't live there and as long as my federal tax dollars aren't given to LA I have no dog in that fight.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > If people live further from each other they have more potential for producing their own goods. I think this is extremely unlikely because it is so much cheaper to mass manufacture and ship things across literally half the entire world than to make them locally. Energy/resource usage is not dominated by low frequency lumber trips, it is the every day push and pull of the mass of people, water, sewage, garbage, food, etc. Without reverting to 1400s lifestyle where you only consume stuff made within a few hundred miles of you, I don’t think there is any way a modern populace consumed less by using more space.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    So you would push for centralization and higher density not because its the only good solution, but because you think people wouldn't want the alternative, right? I don't see anything wrong with your guess that people wouldn't want it, but should that option be effectively removed from us through programs like a tax that incentivizes high density? There's a sawmill I get lumber from about 10 minutes from my house. He gets all his logs from arborists within a few hours of here. They all give him the logs for free because the alternative is either burning them or having to pay by the truckload to take them to the dump. I don't live in the 1400s but I do very much appreciate the ability to get lumber that was milled locally and would otherwise have just been dropped in a hole with a bunch of garbage.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      I don’t see why your lumber mill has to be affected? Land value tax proposals would mostly just change things in urban areas, where land is scarce and valuable. There are no lumber mills there, just rich people who own the land from either having inherited it or an REIT owning it, waiting for it to appreciate. I’m assuming you live in a rural area, which have (relatively) low land values. It’s the strip mall suburbs that are highly inefficiently developed due to no penalty on the inefficiency (caused by low density).
      - _heimdall 2y ago